“ASPEN FUNCTIONED ON THE PRINCIPLE OF FAMILY RESEMBLANCE RATHER THAN THAT OF UNIFORMITY: THERE IS ENOUGH IN COMMON BETWEEN ISSUES FOR THEM TO BE UNDERSTOOD AS PART OF THE SAME BODY OF WORK, BUT EACH ISSUE IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE OTHERS.”
By EMILY KING

Aspen was the original “magazine in a box.” Although launched nearly 40 years ago, the idea behind it – that of a publication being a gathering of multimedia materials rather than a single block of print – remains as relevant as ever. Contemporary audiences can view Aspen at the poetry site UbuWeb, whose virtual version includes images, articles, sound pieces, and film. But of course, there is no substitute for the real thing. Back issues of Aspen are on sale at prohibitive prices, testimony to the magazine’s ongoing currency, but there are also complete runs in several art libraries. I found a set in the Special Collections of the library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. To open an issue of Aspen is to be immersed in the period of its publication. Indeed, the boxes are often compared to time capsules. That said, the magazine’s underlying idea of adopting the form most appropriate to its subject remains highly pertinent. I found it particularly refreshing that Aspen’s containers are designed to reflect the nature of their content. Whereas Visionaire, the best known of today’s boxed publications, comes in boxes that one way or another scream luxury (be they embossed leather, Louis Vuitton-designed, ribbon-fastened, or whatever), Aspen’s packages are relatively modest. Rather than opulence, they communicate intelligence.

Beyond the obvious function of carrying stuff, boxes have a more intriguing secondary use, that of disguising their contents. Whether it’s big gift boxes with bows, mysterious boxes of delights, or the box of Pandora’s undoing, all issues are united by their role in raising questions about the nature of their cargo. The container of Aspen works in a similar fashion. Where conventional magazines are described by their size and shape, the outline of Aspen is merely suggestive. Unlike consumer publications, whose dimensions conform to the expectations of advertisers, and whose heft is in proportion to the number of pages those same advertisers are prepared to buy, Aspen took whatever form the guest designer might suggest. Sometimes flat like a box containing an expensive shirt, and at others a near cube like the package of a pioneering piece of technology, Aspen withheld specific information about its insides until the moment of opening.

Initially scheduled to appear six times a year, Aspen was in fact published only ten times in the period from 1965 to 1971. Its timetable was consistently irregular. Four issues were produced between its launch and Spring 1967 (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1965; Vol. 1, No. 2, 1966; Vol. 1, No. 3, December 1966; and Vol. 1, No. 4, Spring 1967). After that a double issue appeared later in 1967 (No. 5+6), which was followed by a long break only interrupted by an unboxed mailing (No. 6A, 1968-69). Two years on, the magazine seems to have got back in its stride. Issue 7 arrived early in 1969 (No. 7, Spring/Summer 1969), shortly followed by issues 8 and 9 (No. 8, Autumn/Winter 1969; No. 9, Winter/Spring 1969/70). Finally, after another break of over a year, the last issue of Aspen was published in the middle of 1971 (No. 10, Summer 1971).

The magazine was conceived by design and fashion journalist and part time Aspen resident Phyllis Johnson. Originally acting as editor and publisher, Johnson later handed responsibility for editing Aspen to a series of “guests,” but she remained at the helm as publisher throughout its six-year existence. Johnson’s consistent presence, and that of her New York-based publishing company the Roaring Fork Press, is belied by the profound changes that took place in the magazine over the course of its ten issues. The first two issues of Aspen stay close to the original agenda set out in the editorial letter included in issue 1. Celebrating Aspen, Colorado as “one of the few places in America where you can lead a well-rounded, eclectic life of visual, physical, and mental splendor,” Johnson committed the magazine to “the civilized pleasures of modern living, based on the Greek idea of the “whole man.” Although Aspen was published in the city, its early staples were skiing, nature, modern classical music, and lifestyle with an eco-friendly, high-culture twist. Then came Aspen no. 3, and everything changed. In the hands of Andy Warhol and New York-based graphic designer David Dalton, the “Fab” issue included only a single snow-centered lifestyle piece, while the rest of the magazine was devoted to the more urban concerns of Pop artists and musicians.

After that the magazine took a series of editorially dramatic twists and turns. Johnson’s professional background was robustly consumerist, but her own editorial preferences proved anything but. Unlike the other great female editors of her day, women such as Fleur Cowles who created the landmark fashion magazine Flair, Johnson had little time for style. Rather than clothes and cosmetics, her interests centered on the heavy end of the contemporary art spectrum. The fourth Aspen was designed by Quentin Fiore, based on his work with media theorist Marshall McLuhan, double issue 5+6 is the product of artist Brian O’Doherty, an extraordinary survey of the conceptual Minimalism of the period, and issue 6A is a bunch of cheaply printed documents recording a series of performance art events. Aspen’s second burst of energy produced a British issue edited by Mario Amaya, a Fluxus issue edited by Dan Graham, and a psychedelia issue from the hands of Hetty and Angus Maclise. The magazine’s swan song was an art-historical issue devoted to Asian art. This last publication may have indicated a new direction for the magazine, one that never came to fruition. Johnson suggested that Aspen could be viewed as a “time capsule of a certain period.” In fact the magazine moved its focus from place to time, and was just beginning to shift to a broader sense of history when its era came to a close.

Aspen, Colorado, the skiing resort from which the magazine took its name, has an exceptional history. Originally a silver-mining town, it grew rapidly in the late 19^th century when silver was the commonplace currency of the United States. By the early 1890s the town had a population of 12,000, six newspapers, four schools, two theatres, and an opera house. But its fortunes were changed by a single government act. When the US returned to the gold standard in 1893, commercial silver mining dwindled and Aspen was reduced to a rural country seat with ranching as its most valuable resource. By the outbreak of WWII, Aspen’s population had fallen to around 700 residents. In the 1930s there were a few moves to turn the town into a ski resort, but these did not amount to much. It took the outbreak of war and an influx of mountain-based, skiing soldiers to give the place the impetus it needed. One of these soldiers was Friedl Pfiefer who, in partnership with Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke, returned to develop the town in the late 1940s.

While Pfiefer’s aspirations were centered on sport, Paepcke had an ideal of a different kind. He and his wife Elizabeth were keen participants in Chicago’s cultural life: he was a trustee of the University of Chicago and both of them were members of its renowned “Great Books Course.” Walter Paepcke always strove to introduce culture to his commercial activities. Among other things, he had commissioned a series of Modernist artists and designers, many of them European exiles, to create a series of advertisements for his company the Container Corporation of America (CCA). In Aspen, the Paepckes saw an opportunity to expand their commitment to the humanist cause. They wanted to establish “an Athens of the mountains,” a place in which the important cultural and intellectual issues of the day could be discussed in a beautiful, natural setting.

The first big cultural event in Aspen was the Goethe Bicentennial celebration conference held in 1949. Conducted in a tent designed by Eero Saarinen, speakers included Albert Schweitzer and Jose Ortega y Gasset. On the basis of this event the Paepckes developed the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, a center intended for the introduction of American businessmen to culture, although occasionally the businessmen proved somewhat recalcitrant. Alongside activities at the Institute, Aspen hosted other kinds of events including regular music festivals and the annual International Design Conference Aspen (IDCA). During the 1940s and early ’50s, Aspen’s cultural development outstripped that of its infrastructure and people arriving at the early events had to contend with dirt roads and irregular rail services. In his introduction to a collection of papers from the IDCA, Reyner Banham gives a hilarious account of traveling between Chicago and Aspen in a plane “small enough to be upset by thermal currents caused by cigarette stubs and sunbathers.”

An edited selection of papers from the 15^th IDCA is included in the first issue of Aspen magazine and, although not identical, the impulse behind the conference and the publication were closely related. Where the conferences of the early 1950s had been concerned with promoting the value of design to business, later sessions were humanist in a more abstract sense. The papers included in Aspen magazine are from the “Configurations of the New World” conference chaired by industrial designer George Nelson. The aim of this session was to promote a generalized notion of a better way of life and that same sentiment is very much evident in the first two issues of Johnson’s magazine. There is another, possibly specious, link between the culture created by the Paepckes and the founding of Aspen magazine. The town was developed using funds derived from the sale of paperboard packaging and its namesake magazine adopted the form of a box. Probably no more than a coincidence, but a neat one.

The first Aspen magazine is contained in a glossy black box with a large white Bodoni A on its cover. The box opens at a hinge on its left-hand side and the index is printed on its mat black lining. Inside are several booklets, each containing a single article, a flexi-disk, an advertisements folder, and a letter from the editor. Among the trio of designers who worked on this issue was George Lois, an art director famed for his witty, typographically-taught work at Esquire. Johnson described the format as “rather dignified” and, the innovation of the box notwithstanding, the magazine is similar to other classy mainstream magazines of its era such as Alexey Brodovitch’s Harper’s Bazaar. Possibly Johnson chose to take this elegant-but-conventional design route to seduce nervous advertisers. In her editorial letter she teases would-be subscribers by saying, “Who knows what the next issue will be!”

Issue 2, designed by advertising men Frank Kirk and Tony Angotti, adopts a different plan. The box is white rather than black and the type on the cover is understated. The inside of the container is divided into four sections, each holding one or two small black pamphlets. These differences in the form cannot, however, disguise the similarity in subject of the first two issues. Both have a skiing piece, the first dealing with off-piste skiing and the second with racing. Both have a music piece with an accompanying flexi-disk, the one about jazz and the other about the radical Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Both have an environmental piece, the former about the Ptarmigan and the latter concerning the destruction of nature through road building. And both have a lifestyle piece, encompassing a house, a family, and recipes (issue 1 offers Pot au Feu Aspen and issue 2 suggests Boeuf Braise with Spätzle). It is easy to be dismissive about the agenda of these first two issues of Aspen. It is all so bourgeois. But it is important to look at them through the eyes of the time. Their implied rejection of US popular culture has become commonplace, but in the mid-1960s these notions still retained some radical content. To an extent the ideas behind the early issues of Aspen have become victims of their own success; over the last three decades alternative lifestyles have, paradoxically enough, entered the mainstream.

While issues 1 and 2 steered clear of ordinary American life, issue 3 swept it up in an exaggerated embrace. Dressed as a packet of a soap powder called “Fab,” Warhol and Dalton’s magazine eschewed the understatement and elegance of the two previous issues in favor of a tumble of vernacular graphic styles. They included a series of writings on the effects of LSD in the guise of a book of bus tickets, a “Ten Trip Ticket Book,” a flip-book record of a pair of art movies, one by Warhol and the other by Jack Smith, and the only ever issue of The Plastic Exploding Inevitable, effectively a one-off Factory newspaper. Warhol and Dalton made good use of the box format as a means of gathering together different kinds of material and, among all the issues of Aspen, the “Fab” issue offers the most variety in look and feel.

In some ways the material included in the Warhol/Dalton Aspen runs against the high-cultured humanism that inspired the founding of the Aspen resort and the launch of the magazine. The rhetoric of the Warhol crew often displays an aggression and a desire to shock that did not have a place in the society that was being promoted by the Paepckes. All the same, the defining quality of Aspen life was tolerance, and that includes the recognition of oppositional theories. Looking forward to the demise of Aspen five years on, it may have been the magazine’s willingness to accept ideas of all sorts that led to its eventual exhaustion.

After issue 3 broke the mold, each new Aspen adopted a design and editorial policy all of its own. No. 4, the Fiore-designed McLuhan issue, came in a box illustrated with a diagram of an electrical circuit and introduced by a text that begins on the box’s cover and ends on its lining. Taken from Fiore and McLuhan’s book The Media is the Message, this paragraph emphasizes the all-pervasiveness of the media. According to the message inside the box, “any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments.” Among the nine items included in issue 4 is an indigo press proof of the McLuhan/Fiore book. This piece creates the impression of ideas in progress and flatters the readers’ desire to be in on something from the beginning. The advertisements for no. 4 are held in a magenta folder inscribed with McLuhan’s theory of effective advertising. The more insidious the better apparently, but none of the promotions inside appear likely candidates for subliminal success.

Although issues of Aspen are very different from one another, there is a degree of continuity between writers and designers. For example Bob Chamberlain contributed pieces to several publications (writing about dancing in no. 3 and motorcycles in no. 4) and David Dalton went from designing the breakaway issue no. 3 to co-designing the double issue no. 5+6 with Lynn Letterman. The presence of Dalton notwithstanding, the look of Aspen 5+6 is completely unlike that of the third Aspen. So much so that it represents another leap in the life of the magazine. Guest edited by artist Brian O’Doherty (who later wrote the seminal “white cube” essays), it is presented in a square white box constructed from heavy, textured cardboard. This container stands upright and the top rests on the bottom, the one half identical to the other, with no means of closure. It is an object to be displayed rather than toted around. The contents of the box are described schematically: one box, one book, four films, five records, eight boards, ten printed data. This deadpan index fits with the minimalism of the art inside, including pieces by Sol Lewitt, Dan Graham, and John Cage, and a build-your-own sculpture by Tony Smith.

As well as the innovatory notion of interactivity, Aspen 5+6 was the first publication to include a reel of Super-8 film. Lasting around fifteen minutes, this movie juxtaposed clips by avant-garde stalwarts Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Hans Richter with material by younger artists Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, and Stan VanDerBeek. The main texts for 5+6 are republished articles by the celebrated authors Roland Barthes, George Kubler, and Susan Sontag. The variety of the contents of O’Doherty’s Aspen is belied by the uniformity of their presentation. Set in a low-key sans serif font, the essays are brought together in a single square leaflet, and all other printed items adopt roughly the same format. The magazine’s seductive understatement has contributed to its becoming the most collectible of all ten issues.

The subscription slip enclosed in 5+6 asks the question, “Is this the Aspen box to end all boxes?” It was the last of the initial six-issue release and it has all the qualities of a grand finale – no. 6A being something of an afterthought. The three-year gap between substantial issues of Aspen raises questions about the efforts that went into producing the second set of the magazine. Certainly the last four issues were published on slightly different terms than those that went before. In particular, there were no advertisements in the magazine after those included in 5+6.

Aspen 7, the “British Box,” was edited by critic and curator Mario Amaya (the man who was shot alongside Andy Warhol). This issue shuns the seriousness of 5+6 and professes an “informal theme of fun and games.” The box is fronted by a Pop-abstract motif designed by Richard Smith, and among the items inside are a paper pattern for a pair of “British Knickers” by Ossie Clark and a diary of the future by John Lennon. Written in November 1968, Lennon’s diary includes memorable days such as Thursday, 30 January 1969: “Got up, went to work, came home, watched telly, went to bed.” Although Amaya claims frivolity, his opening essay “The ‘London’ Decade” is a convincing analysis of London’s 1960s ascendancy.

Aspen 8 returns to many of the ideas introduced in 5+6. Edited by previous contributor Dan Graham and designed by Fluxus artist George Maciunas, its theme is information and it opens with the statement: “Art information and science information share the same world and languages.” The magazine includes a poster-sized image of a parking lot by Ed Ruscha, a description of a sculptural project by Richard Serra, a scheme that involves dropping molten lead from an airplane, and an account of various “Ecologic Projects,” artworks that encompass planting and harvesting. But for all they have in common, Graham’s Aspen is significantly more various in tone and texture than that of O’Doherty. It creates space for mess and happenstance. By arriving in a lightweight cardboard folder covered in text, it advertises a concern with communication above display.

The penultimate Aspen also came in something closer to a folder than a box. The creation of Hetty Maclise, the cover of issue 9 is a composition of bright, abstract swirls. The contents of the magazine are a selection of images and texts largely derived from the North American take on Eastern philosophies and religions. Hetty Maclise co-edited the publication with her husband Angus, the drummer and poet who quit the Velvet Underground when the band began to play for money. Angus Maclise’s freewheeling musical training took him around the world, from Haiti to the Middle East and on to India, and these travels supplied him with a suitcase of alternative ideas, many of which found a home in Aspen. It is possible that the last Aspen, no. 10, was a reaction to the Maclise issue. A considered, art-historical survey of Asian art, it provides a welcome corrective to the unfixed hippie sentiments of the previous issue.

Coincident with the closure of Aspen magazine was a crisis at the Aspen Design Conference. The 1970 event, titled “Environment by Design,” had been the scene of unpleasant conflicts between those who believed in systematic, rational action and those who took a more nihilistic view. The latter position was most forcefully argued by a French delegation, whose members ridiculed the Aspen ideal, calling the resort “the Disneyland of environment and design.” This contingent proposed that environmentalism was the “opium of the people,” a means by which governments distracted their populations from the more urgent issues, and in the case of the United States the ongoing war in Vietnam. Of course they had a point. By the early 1970s the Paepckes’ notion of benign capitalism was beginning to look less and less realistic. The antagonism of the 1970 IDCA raged unchecked, thriving in a conference structure that had been established to foster open debate. The liberal-minded humanism that was at the core of the Aspen philosophy was transformed into the mechanism for its own demise.

The events at Aspen magazine are not equivalent to those at the conference, but there are some parallels. The magazine was also open to ideas to an almost willful degree and the extreme contrasts in tone between the last two issues suggest that its editorial path was becoming less certain. It is possible to read Aspen 10 as a rebuke to the one before. Perhaps Johnson began to doubt the validity of the hippie, drug-associated view of non-Western culture and was keen to offer an alternative. Could she have felt that the magazine’s liberalism had led it to promote values that were not in keeping with its founding ideal?

Whatever the editorial debates at Roaring Fork Press, Aspen magazine was finally killed off by a much more prosaic concern: that of postage. On August 20^th, 1971 the US Postmaster General rejected Johnson’s appeal against the denial of mail privileges for the magazine. Upholding a ruling that Aspen was not sufficiently “periodical,” the postal service withdrew the lower rates available to more conventional publications. The Postmaster took particular exception to the fact that “each issue of Aspen is complete unto itself and bears no relation to the prior or subsequent issues” and that “each issue of Aspen could be considered to be an independent work, capable of standing alone.” These are, of course, the magazine’s great virtues. Aspen functioned on the principle of family resemblance rather than that of uniformity: there is enough in common between issues for them to be understood as part of the same body of work, but each issue is very different from all the others. This idea has become very current. Publications such as the aforementioned Visionaire, or Jop Van Bennekom’s Re-Magazine are prone to changes in format, but can still be comprehended as a series. Aspen magazine’s downfall was the direct result of its openness and flexibility, its ability to absorb a variety of media. It is hugely ironic that, 30 years hence, these same qualities are the source of its ongoing relevance.

http://www.ubu.com/aspen

INDEX OF ARTISTS AND AUTHORS OF ASPEN No. 1-10

Richard Alpert, Mario Amaya, Tony Angotti, David Antin, Eleanor Antin, Terry Atkinson, Allen Atwell, John Henry Auran. Jo Baer, Carroll Baker, Richard Baker, Michael Baldwin, J.G. Ballard, Frank Barron, Roland Barthes, David T. Bazelton, Samuel Beckett, Michael Benedikt, Bill Evans Trio, Peter Blake, James Blue, Richard Blum, Richard Blumofe, Mel Bochner, Sigmund Bode, Faubion Bowers, Larry Bunker, John Burchard, William Burroughs, Michael Butor. John Cage, John Cale, Tom Carroll, Bob Chamberlain, Ching Ying, Chou Tun-I, Ossie Clark, Peggy Clifford, Allen Cohen, Harvey Cohen, Ira Cohen, Norman Corwin, Tom Courtos, Merce Cunningham. David Dalton, Mario Davidovsky, William De Kooning, Aymon De Sayles, Bill Devore, Arthur Drexler, Marcel Duchamp, Monty Dunn. Alfred Etter, Bill Evans. Morey Field, Morton Feldman, Christopher Finch, Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Finn, Quentin Fiore, Freddie Fisher, Benno Friedman, William Frosch, John Furnival. Naum Gabo, Jack Garfein, Arnold Gassan, Tony Gauba, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Grace Glueck, Dan Graham, Nikki Grand. Michael Harner, Al Hansen, Philip M. Hauser, Clancy Hayes, Bici Hendricks, Geoff Hendricks, Jon Hendricks, Denis Higgins, Charles Hinman, Stanley Hirsin, David Hockney, Abram Hoffer, Richard Howard, Huai-su, Peanuts Hucko, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hui-tsung. Takahiko Iimura, Michael Instone, Dropper Ishmael, Chuck Israels. Ken Jacobs, Jasper Johns. Allan Kaprow, Eric Kast, Frank Kirk, Arthur Knight, Ogata Korin, John Kosh, George Kubler, Daniel Kunin. Kuo Hsi Laing, Gerald Lawson, Yank Leary, Timothy Lee, Paul Lennon, John Letterman, Lynn Lewis, Bob LeWitt, Sol Lichtenstein, Roy Lionni, Paolo Logue, Christopher Lohman, Joseph D. Lois, George Longhorne, Bruce Lucie-Smith, Edward Lukeman, Alex Luray, Martin Lynch, Rev. William F Lyon. Danny MacAgy, Douglas MacCann, Lou McGarrity, Jack MacGowan, George Maciunas, Angus MacLise, Hetty MacLise, Jackson MacLow, Marshall McLuhan, Gerard Malanga, Abby Mann, Eva Marie-Saint, Albert & David Maysles, Jonas Mekas, Dr. Karl Meninger, Kenneth Metzner, Kate Millet, Jim Milmoe, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Charlotte Moorman, Robert Morris, Gordon Mumma. Claudio Naranjo, George Nelson, Max Neuhaus, Kenneth Noland. Brian O’Doherty, Patricia Oberhaus, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Ralph Ortiz, Robert Osborn. Nam June Paik, Eduardo Paolozzi, Noton Pevsner, Lil Picard, Larry Poons, Thomas Powers. Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, James W. Rouse, Lou Reed, Steve Reich, Jean Renoir, Hans Richter, Bridget Riley, Terry Riley, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Davidm Robinson, Diane Rochlin, Steve Rose, James Rosenquist, Philip Rosenthal, Jan C. Rowan, Edward Ruscha. Raja Samyana, Steve Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Alexander Scriabin, Richard Serra, Robert Shelton, Nori Sinoto, Osvald Siren, Huston Smith, Jack Smith, John Macauley Smith, Robert Smith, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Don Snyder, Gary Snyder, Susan Sontag, Elsen Standlee, Lou Stein. Ronald Tavel, John Tavener, Robert G. W Theobald, Michael Thomas, Timothy Thomas, Jean Toche, Hosegawa Tokaku, Christopher Tree, Lionel Trilling, Ernest Trova, Tung Ch’I ch’ang, Ralph Tuzzo. Stuart L Udall, USCO, Vali, Stan VanDerBeek, Velvet Underground. Rolf Von Eckartsberg. Konrad Wachsmann, Peter Walker, Andy Warhol, Dale Wilbourn, John Wilcock, Martin Wohl. Jud Yalkut, Ying Yu-Chien, La Monte Young. Marian Zazeela, P. Zimmer, Lionel Ziprin, Ziska.